More seriously, I'm really a XP-WHore but I don't feel it isn't something necessary bad.

Let me explain :I like recognition from my peer (through XP, reputation, rank...)
It's not my goal, however, it's only a good support in my path to Perl Mastery and sometimes and indication of my progress/weknesses when I post technical posts...

As long a you're aware that rank is not a tied only to your Perl level, but to the way you contribute to the monastery it doesn't seem so evil.

A lot of posts often mean, a lot of answers or questions which leads to answers => Lots of info (you contribute!)

Being pleasant is not only a way to gain XP it's also a way to make discussion pleasant and more interesting (or even possible)

And of course you also need to know the rules of XP-not-whoring or "how not to get XP's with a detailed, accurate and sound post":

post during the week-end: a killer, no one reads "technical" posts during the week-end, discussions are OK because people just read them quickly and upvote the whole thread just to use all their votes, but no one downloads and check code when they're still half asleep and in a hurry to ++ as many posts as possible before making breakfast for the whole family,

post after 7pm GMT: by that time even West Coast monks have used up all of their daily allowance and by the time everybody gets their votes on the next day your post will be burried way down at the bottom of the Newest Nodes list,

correct a mistake by a high-ranking monk: yeah, like anybody's going to believe you!

post a Re: Re: Re: Re node: of course no one reads those,

Q&A answers: for some reason these always get a ridiculously low amount of votes, if any, probably because the name of the poster does not appear and Monks like to know who they give their favors to,

post something about security or cryptography: of course general advice like "Though shall use CGI.pm" or
"Net::SSL does what you want" rack up the votes, as no one can argue with the Gospel, but anything more detailed and specific seems to scare the s*** out of Monks who are very hesitant to give their blessing to a method they have not seen approved by higher authorities,

And by the way you forgot the easiest trick to get XP's, even without writing a new post: just type "Hey, just 6 more votes and I'll gain a level" in the CB and wait...